by Paul Myerberg, USA TODAY Sports

by Paul Myerberg, USA TODAY Sports

ATLANTA â?? Dick Vitale is a hall of famer 12 times over, with June's induction into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame, where he'll go in along with columnist and author Mitch Albom, the latest honor in a distinguished post-coaching career.

Vitale was elected to the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2008, becoming one of the few inductees enshrined primarily for their work in broadcasting.

He tasted success as a college coach, first as an assistant at Rutgers before taking over at the University of Detroit, and spent two seasons in the NBA with the Detroit Pistons before being hired at ESPN in 1983.

But in a conversation Saturday with USA TODAY Sports, Vitale spoke of the "one little emptiness" he feels when looking back on his life in basketball â?? the one thing Vitale lists as missing from his professional career.

"I was telling a bunch of my buddies yesterday," Vitale said. "Because they were saying, 'Look at your career, you've got to be so fulfilled.'

"I said I am, but I was telling my wife, there's one little emptiness I have: when it's all said and done, I never ever had my dream of coaching a mega, mega school," Vitale said. "Where I walk in and I say to a kid, hey, Dick Vitale, I'm from Carolina, I'm from Michigan, I'm from Notre Dame."

Instead, Vitale said, he had to "bust my gut" to make things happen at Detroit and Rutgers, two smaller-profile schools without the same built-in name recognition as one of college basketball's elite programs.

"I needed two weeks to get a kid excited to listen to me," Vitale said of his college coaching career. "Because I always believed you go after the best. When I was at Rutgers, my first group of recruits, I said, who we going to be? Lehigh, Lafayette, Bucknell?

"I want to be Kentucky. They all laughed at me," Vitale said. "I never forget this, I said if you think you're mediocre you'll be mediocre. I said we're going to go after the best."

This approached worked over his three seasons (1971-73) under Dick Lloyd at Rutgers, when he helped Lloyd and the Scarlet Knights reel in big-time recruits like Phil Sellers and Mike Dabney before taking the job at Detroit, where he went 78-30 from 1973-77.

"We ended up signing Phil Sellers, Mike Dabney, they went undefeated, that class," Vitale said of his time at Rutgers. "I went on, got the Detroit job. Dick Lloyd and I busted our gut to get all those great kids. I believed."

Given his experience at Rutgers â?? and given the fact that the school, which fired Mike Rice on Wednesday, is in the market for a new coach â?? would Vitale entertain the thought of moving back into coaching if the Scarlet Knights made the call, giving him the opportunity to rectify this one missing piece of his career?

"I don't have the calendar on my side," Vitale said, laughing. "The calendar is not on my side."